Her One Mistake(83)
“No.” I shook my head manically. “No, that can’t be true.”
“He wasn’t in good shape, but he didn’t know what was happening or was in any pain, and the paramedics did everything they could—”
“No,” I cried out, clamping my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. If I didn’t hear it, it might not be true. Just as I’d believed when I’d seen my mum’s empty hospital bed.
My father couldn’t be dead. Not when I had so much I needed to say to him.
“Harriet.” Charlotte pried my hands away from my ears. “You need to be careful,” she whispered urgently. “There’s too many people nearby.”
“But I haven’t told him I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “He’ll never know.”
He’d never know that if I could turn back time, I would in a heartbeat, and I’d go back to the day he walked back into my life. And this time I would never have asked of him what I did. I would never have put him in a position where he couldn’t say no.
Grief balled in the pit of my stomach, expanding with every tight breath I inhaled. Not my dad. Not the man who’d put his life at risk for me and Alice. This was all my fault and now it was too late and there was nothing I could do to make any of it better. “He only took her to keep us safe.”
“Harriet!” Charlotte said. “You can’t do this. Someone will be watching.”
I knew what she was telling me. The police would be monitoring my every move. I wasn’t supposed to show remorse for the man who had taken my child. But I couldn’t help it. Bile rose so quickly, so forcefully, that before I could stop myself I threw up outside the back doors of the ambulance.
Charlotte’s arms were instantly around me, stroking my hair, making me sit next to Alice, who had thankfully fallen asleep already. How much I wanted to lie down with her, have sleep take me away too, turn this into nothing more than a bad dream.
“You cannot break down. He took your daughter, remember,” she said so quietly only I could hear.
“But it’s all my fault,” I whimpered. She knew that, of course, but still she continued to stroke my hair and tell me I needed to pull myself together.
Yet the pain wrenched at my insides, tugging them apart, scrunching them back together haphazardly until they felt like they weren’t a part of me. A searing heat spread through me like fire until I could feel nothing else.
I couldn’t let them think my father was responsible. Not now that he was dead. I lifted my head up, surveying the scene that stretched around me. Taking in the chaos; the panic; the pain. Everyone was only here because of me.
“How can I live with myself if I don’t tell the truth?” I murmured.
“Harriet, look,” Charlotte snapped, turning my head to the left. Alice was curled up in the shape of a peanut. Her breaths slow and deep. Oblivious—as she should be. “How can you live with yourself if you do?”
? ? ?
I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND how, after everything I’d done to her, Charlotte was trying to protect me, but I never got the chance to ask her why. Or indeed whether she would be prepared to lie for me. At that moment a police officer appeared at the back of the ambulance, introducing herself as Detective Rawlings, and while she murmured condolences for nothing specific, she asked both Charlotte and me to accompany her to the station where she and her colleague would ask us some questions. Another officer would stay with Alice, she assured me, as she led me to the car waiting in the parking lot. I never got the chance to tell Charlotte how sorry I was before she was led in for questioning. And I never got the chance to ask how far she was prepared to go.
NOW
From the moment my dad agreed to this plan, I’d always known there was every possibility I’d one day find myself lying to the police. I tried convincing myself he would get away with hiding her for me and tried not thinking about the many ways it could go wrong, but I knew, of course I knew, how easily it could.
Sometimes I imagined myself in an interrogation room—my only ideas of them conjured from TV dramas—and I’d stick to my story, persuading the police I had nothing to do with my daughter’s disappearance.
What I never considered was that I’d also be lying about murdering my husband.
Is it murder? I left him to die, but I didn’t actually kill him. Is there a difference? My fingers tap nervously on the table as I wait for Detective Lowry to come back into the room. I wonder what the detective was called away for and suspect there must be news of Brian.
Maybe he isn’t even dead, I think, my fingers pausing as the door swings open. I move my hands to my lap so Lowry can’t see them twitching. He doesn’t look at me as he slides back into his chair and speaks into the microphone, well-rehearsed lines rolling off his tongue as he announces the interview has begun.
I have already told the detective how my husband abused me for years, that he dragged me onto the boat tonight against my will, leaving my daughter alone on the beach. I’ve told him Charlotte will vouch for this, as she found Alice on the rocks.
“What I don’t understand, Harriet,” he says, “is why you never thought to mention that your dad was actually still alive when Alice first went missing.”
I look at him, silenced briefly, because I’d expected him to continue asking me about Brian. But his words fire into the room like a bullet, loud and sharp as they echo around my head.